Category: Women Priests

Posted on

Women strive for larger roles in male-dominated religions

By DAVID CRARY

Women have been elected heads of national governments on six continents. They have flown into space, served in elite combat units and won every category of Nobel Prize. The global #MeToo movement, in 15 months, has toppled a multitude of powerful men linked to sexual misconduct.

Yet in most of the world’s major religions, women remain relegated to a second-tier status. Women in several faiths are still barred from ordination. Some are banned from praying alongside men and forbidden from stepping foot in some houses of worship altogether. Their attire, from headwear down to the length of their skirts in church, is often restricted.

But women around the world in recent months have been finding new ways to chip away at centuries of male-dominated traditions and barriers, with many of them emboldened by the surge of social media activism that’s spread globally in the #MeToo era.

Millions of women in India this month formed a human wall nearly 400 miles long in support of women who defied conservative Hindu leaders and entered an important temple that has long been off-limits to women and girls between the ages of 10 and 50.

In Israel, where Orthodox Judaism has long restricted women’s roles, one Jerusalem congregation has allowed women to lead Friday evening prayers. Roman Catholic bishops, under pressure from women’s-rights activists, concluded a recent Vatican meeting by declaring that women, as an urgent “duty of justice,” should have a greater role in church decision-making.

Many feminist scholars are challenging the rightfulness of long-standing patriarchal traditions in Christianity, Judaism and Islam, calling into question time-honored translations of verses in the Bible, Torah and Quran that have been used to justify a male-dominated hierarchy.

Social media is seen as a big catalyst in boosting activism and forging solidarity among women of faith who seek more equality. The #MeToo movement has been evoked — even in the ranks of conservative U.S. denominations — as a reason why women should expect more respectful treatment from male clergy, and a greater share of leadership roles.

“Women are looking for opportunities to have their voices heard and be more effective in their religious traditions,” said Gina Messina, a religion professor at Ursuline College in Ohio who describes herself as both a feminist and a Catholic theologian. “Using social media is an opportunity to say what they think.”

She co-founded a blog called Feminism and Religion that has scores of contributors around the world and followers in more than 180 countries. She also co-edited a collection of essays by Christian, Jewish and Muslim women explaining why they haven’t abandoned their patriarchal-leaning faiths.

“The perception seems to be that it is a feminist act only to leave such a religion. We contend that it is also a feminist act to stay,” the three editors write in their foreword.

Here’s a brief look at the status of gender equality in several of the world’s religions:

ROMAN CATHOLICISM

Catholic doctrine mandates an all-male priesthood, on the grounds that Jesus’ apostles were men.

A decades-long campaign for women’s ordination has made little headway and some advocates of that change have been excommunicated. Women do play major roles in Catholic education, health care and parish administration

While the recent meeting of bishops at the Vatican produced a call to expand women’s presence in church affairs, no details were proposed. The seven nuns who participated along with 267 male clergy were not allowed to vote on the final document.

Earlier this year, a Vatican magazine published an expose detailing how nuns are often treated like indentured servants by cardinals and bishops, for whom they cook and clean with little recompense.

At the University of Dayton, a Catholic school in Ohio, religion professor Sandra Yocum says some of the young women she teaches “are having a hard time seeing where they fit in” as they assess the church’s doctrine on gender roles and its pervasive clergy sex-abuse scandals.

“They have a deep concern for the church,” she said. “They want to respond in some way and take a leadership role.”

Messina sometimes engages in “small acts of dissent” to show displeasure with patriarchal Catholic traditions. At the recent funeral for her grandmother, she changed a Bible reading to make the passage gender-neutral.

“We have to continue to push — regardless of whether it’s in our generation or five generations from now.”

Rose Dyar, a senior at the University of Dayton, says she’s determined to team with other young Catholics to help the church overcome its challenges. The ban on female priests isn’t enough to drive her from Catholicism, but it dismays her.

“I absolutely support women’s ordination,” she said. “Unfortunately I don’t foresee it happening anytime soon, and that breaks my heart.”

ISLAM

Some of the most important traditions and practices of the Prophet Muhammad were preserved and carried forth by the women closest to him— his wives and daughters. But as with many other major faiths, women in Islamic tradition have largely been relegated to supporting roles throughout recent history.

Women in Islam do not lead prayer or give traditional Friday sermons. In larger mosques where women are welcome, they are almost always segregated from men in the back or allocated spaces on other floors with separate entrances and exits.

In Saudi Arabia, a male-dominated interpretation of Islam bars women from traveling or obtaining a passport without the consent of a male guardian. Only this year did the kingdom allowed women to drive.

Changes are happening elsewhere. In Tunisia, President Beji Caid Essebsi has proposed giving women equal inheritance rights with men — a much-debated topic around the Muslim world. In the Palestinian territories, Kholoud al-Faqih became the first female Shariah court judge in 2009, in part to help women beset by domestic violence.

Some women are challenging interpretations that state only men must attend traditional Friday prayers. A few have chosen to create their own prayer spaces, like the Women’s Mosque of America in California where women lead the services and female scholars share their knowledge.

The bylaws for that mosque were drafted by Atiya Aftab, who teaches Islamic Law at Rutgers University and is chair of the board at her mosque — a first for a woman in New Jersey. She says moves in the U.S. to expand women’s roles in the Islamic community have sometimes been met with conservative backlash, but the momentum for change seems strong.

In Texas, Muslim women recently formed a group that has investigated and publicized instances of sexual, physical and spiritual abuse committed against women by Muslim community leaders.

JUDAISM

The gender situation within Judaism is markedly different in Israel and the United States, which together account for more than 80 percent of the world’s Jewish population.

The largest U.S. branches, Reform and Conservative, allow women to be rabbis, while the Orthodox branch does not. In Israel, the Conservative and Reform movements are small, and Orthodox authorities hold a near monopoly on all matters regarding Judaism.

One major source of contention: the Orthodox-enforced policy of prohibiting women from praying alongside men at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the holiest site where Jews can pray. Numerous women protesting the policy have been arrested, and several American Jewish groups were angered last year when Israel’s government backtracked on plans to expand a space where both men and women could pray.

However, there have been moves to expand Orthodox women’s roles in religious life. A Jerusalem congregation, Shira Hadasha, has adopted a liberal interpretation of Jewish religious law that incorporates women’s involvement in services, such as leading Friday evening prayers and reciting from the Torah on the Sabbath.

An Orthodox organization called Tzohar is trying to advance women in roles where social custom, not religious law, has excluded them — such as teaching Jewish law or certifying restaurants’ compliance with kosher standards.

“If Jewish law does not say that something is prohibited, but just because of social or cultural reasons women were not involved, we see no reason that they should not be involved, said Tzohar’s chairman, Rabbi David Stav.

MORMONISM

Women in the Mormon church are barred from being priests, leading local congregations or holding the top leadership posts in a faith that counts 16 million members worldwide.

The highest-ranking women in the church oversee three organizations that run programs for women and girls. These councils sit below several layers of leadership groups reserved for men.

The role of women in the conservative religion, officially named The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has been a subject of debate for many years, with some members pushing for more equality and increased visibility for women.

The church has made some changes in recent years; women’s groups say they mark small progress. In 2013, a woman for the first time led the opening prayer at the faith’s semiannual general conference in Salt Lake City. Later that year, a conference session previously limited to men was broadcast live for all to watch.

Mormon women are still expected to wear skirts or dresses to worship services and inside temples, but the religion has loosened its rules in recent years to allow women who work at church headquarters to wear pantsuits or dress slacks and to let women serving proselytizing missions to wear dress slacks.

The church shows no signs of budging on women’s ordination. Kate Kelly, the founder of a group called Ordain Women that led protests outside church conferences, was expelled from the faith in 2014.

“We’re in it for the long haul,” said Lorie Winder Stromberg, 66, a member of Ordain Women’s executive board. “I think women’s ordination is inevitable — but I have no sense of the timing.”

HINDUISM AND BUDDHISM

The gender-equality situation in these two Asian-based faiths is difficult to summarize briefly. Neither has a single supreme entity that enforces doctrine, and each has multiple branches with different philosophies and practices.

In Buddhism, women’s status varies from country to country. In Thailand, a Buddhist stronghold, women can become nuns — often acting as glorified temple housekeepers — but only in 2003 won the right to serve as the saffron-robed full equivalents of male monks, and still represent just a tiny fraction of the country’s clergy.

India’s Sabarimala temple had long banned women and girls of menstruating age from entering the centuries-old house of worship. Some Hindus consider menstruating women to be impure.

The Supreme Court in September lifted the ban, and violent protests broke out after women entered the temple. Earlier this month, women formed a human chain spanning than 600 kilometers (375 miles) to support gender equality.

“The Hindu temples at present have almost 99 percent male priests,” said women’s rights activist Ranjana Kumari, director of New Delhi-based Center for Social Research. “Things have to improve.”

SOUTHERN BAPTISTS

While many Protestant denominations now ordain women, the largest in the U.S. — the Southern Baptist Convention — is among those that don’t. It advocates that women submit to male leadership in their church and to a husband’s leadership at home.

Southern Baptist leaders say this doctrine aligns with New Testament teaching. One passage they cite quotes the apostle Paul as writing, “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man.”

A recent statement from SBC leadership insisted that Southern Baptists “are not anti-woman.”

“However, because Scripture speaks specifically to the role of pastor, churches are under a moral imperative to be guided by that teaching, rather than the shifting opinions of human cultures.”

Cheryl Summers, a former Southern Baptist who has challenged the church to improve its treatment of women, describes this gender doctrine as “tortured logic” — especially given the accomplishments of SBC women in the secular world.

“There’s tremendous cognitive dissonance for a woman of faith who is leading professionally or through volunteer efforts when she experiences the glass ceiling and walls in her place of worship,” Summers said via email.

For the past year, the SBC has been roiled by a series of sexual misconduct cases involving churches and seminaries, prompting some activist women to demand new anti-abuse policies.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

The other F word

By Angela Mary Griffin

When I taught in a Catholic secondary school in Ontario, some older colleagues who had come of age during the 1960s and who taught in the school’s Religion department lived in a Catholic commune of sorts in the poorer area of the downtown core.

In their cluster of small, East-end homes, they helped one another raise their children. Some of these families had no car, choosing public transport instead. They did not attend Mass in any of the churches in town. Rather, they invited female, Catholic priests into their homes to celebrate Mass. They also used female clergy, gay clergy, or married clergy, not recognized by the Catholic Church, to perform family wedding, baptismal, and death rituals.

Once their daughters became young women, they chose to no longer celebrate any aspect of their Catholic faith. My colleagues had raised their daughters to be feminists and activists. These young women told their parents that until the Catholic Church decided to no longer treat women as second class citizens, they could not participate in that religion. Their parents, Catholic Religious Studies’ teachers, fully supported that decision.

A writer of historical romantic novels interviewed on the CBC last summer said that she was not a feminist. The two writers on the panel with her assured her that she was. She simply didn’t know what a feminist was, they told her. They said they would define it for her after the panel discussion. Hopefully, they did so.

I’ll define it for everyone here: A feminist advocates for the social, political, educational, and financial equality of women and men. That’s it. We’re not lesbians, though some may be. We do not hate men, though some feminists might. Being a feminist doesn’t mandate that you be a lesbian or a man-hater. Those attributes are not characteristics necessary to define oneself as a feminist.

The word feminist is the other f-word. It gets a bad rap.

I always teach a lesson about feminism on December 6, the anniversary of the Montréal massacre. On December 6, 1989, a gunman (whom I choose not to name here) stormed into Montréal’s École Polytechnique (Engineering School) and ordered all of the men from a Christmas examination room. He then told all of the women that he hated them because they were feminists and opened fire murdering all fourteen young women. He killed them because they were women studying to become engineers, a traditionally male profession. The Montréal police later discovered a death list in the killer’s apartment that targeted prominent Montréal women holding down traditionally male occupations.

With the Me Too and Times Up movements, it is past time to accept that women are equal. We are equal in the eyes of God and we should be equal in the eyes of men and women everywhere. It is no longer acceptable for anyone, especially a learned women, to profess that she is not a feminist. I can assure you that she is. If she is educated, votes in elections, earns a wage equal to men, she is a feminist and she has all of the women who came before her who courageously fought for her right to be educated, employed, well-paid, and have an electoral voice to thank for her life, which in this great nation is one steeped in freedom and equality.

As for young women refusing to participate in the religion of their parents because of antiquated, misogynistic policies, who can blame these learned females? Time’s up for every faith to embrace women as equals, and to open its doors and windows to the winds of equality.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Lucetta Scaraffia Is Trying to Fight Catholic Patriarchy from the Inside

The editor of Women Church World, a monthly magazine published by the Vatican, believes that change is coming to Catholicism.

Pope Francis “is not a feminist,” Scaraffia said. But he is, she believes, a “good politician,” an adaptive realist who can see that the Church, in its present form, is disappointing and wounding many of its members.

By

This past March, a small Catholic magazine called Women Church World ran an article titled “The (almost) free work of sisters.” In it, the journalist Marie-Lucile Kubacki described nuns who, among other menial tasks, serve meals to bishops and then eat in the kitchen, and who are paid little or nothing for the work they do. That institutional sexism pertains in the Catholic Church was not a shock, but the messenger was a surprise: Women Church World is published by the Vatican. The Associated Press ran a piece about the exposé, which was subsequently covered by the Times, PBS, and other outlets. The A.P. and the Times both illustrated their pieces with portraits of the magazine’s founder and editor, Lucetta Scaraffia, a seventy-year-old history professor who wears her white-blond hair chopped short, like a monk with a chic hairdresser, and identifies as a feminist.

Scaraffia lives in Rome, but she spends summers in Todi, about an hour’s drive from the birthplace of St. Francis. In June, I went to see her there. Scaraffia founded Women Church World in 2012. The magazine circulates, once a month, with L’Osservatore Romano, a daily broadsheet that was created more than a hundred and fifty years ago and that has a fuzzy sort of editorial independence from Church leadership. There are boundaries to what Women Church World can publish, too, Scaraffia told me, sitting in her summer home’s living room, decorated with old advertisements for Napoleon, who kept Pope Pius VII in prison for several years.

Scaraffia does not regularly see the Pope, but he has her cell-phone number. He once called it, she told me, to say that he liked a book of hers that criticized the Church for not listening to women. Scaraffia is, by and large, quite conservative: she does not want women to be priests, nor does she want the Pope to upend the Church’s positions on sexual mores, she told me. But she thinks that abortion should be legal, and she believes in a merciful Church, with doctrinal walls porous enough to welcome believers who do not conform to teachings on sex and romantic love.

She also believes that Catholic women can and should take on a larger role in Church decisions—they need to make “concrete political moves,” she told me, and to ask “for things we can actually obtain.” The Vatican is a mostly breezeless state, faithful to a heavy inheritance bequeathed by the Gospels, but Scaraffia is attentive to whatever wind there might be. The magazine’s exposé about nuns was inspired in part by comments that Francis made two years ago to a group of sisters. He said that he was troubled to see them assigned to “a labor of servitude and not of service.” “So we wrote the article,” Scaraffia said. After it was published, she heard from nuns who were relieved to see the Church acknowledge that women’s subservience was a violation of divine prescription. (“The priests said nothing,” she said.)

Acknowledgement, of course, is not the same as change. This past summer brought new disclosures that clerics had molested and raped thousands of children, from Germany to Pennsylvania. Earlier this year, cardinals from four continents were summoned to answer either to the Pope or to the courts for abusing minors or for protecting those who did. One archbishop has accused Pope Francis of knowing about sexual-abuse accusations against Theodore E. McCarrick and elevating him regardless. (McCarrick resigned as the archbishop of Washington in July.) The revelations have led to additional calls for women to take on greater authority in the Church: perhaps if women occupied more positions of power, the argument goes, these men would not have been able to act with impunity for so long.

A few days after our first meeting, I met Scaraffia for dinner on her porch, along with her husband, who is also a historian, and a translator. The lights of the region’s medieval castles, both authentic and faux, were bright in the evening. At one point in our conversation, over pasta and a plate of mozzarella, Scaraffia said, “I would like for women to become cardinals.” After the comment was relayed in English, I paused. A woman who doesn’t think that women should be priests, or take birth-control pills, believes that women should be cardinals, and occupy the rank just beneath the Pope, whom cardinals elect and advise?

Yes, Scaraffia said. It’s true that the Vatican prohibits women from ordination into the clerical hierarchy—though nuns take vows, they are not ordained, and so they are laypeople, not clerics. Priests, who consecrate the host at Mass, must be ordained to do so, but Catholic theology does not mandate that cardinals be ordained. So, theologically speaking, laypeople, including laywomen, can be cardinals. Pope Francis “would have everyone against him” if he named a female cardinal, Scaraffia said. “Everyone.” She laughed. “He might do it just before he dies, or renounces his papacy,” she went on. But “he could do it,” she added. “He might.”

Growing up, in Turin, Scaraffia went to mass with her mother, who took her less out of piety than out of concern for her daughter’s social well-being, Scaraffia told me. Her mother was beautiful, she said. “It became a weakness for her, not a strength. Working outside of the household was a nightmare for her.” She married at twenty years old and resigned herself to a quiet life. Scaraffia would later come to feel that her work, as a feminist, and then as a Catholic, was, in part, “to spare other women of what my mother had endured.”

Scaraffia stopped going to mass during her first year at college. She got married at twenty-three and divorced two years later. While studying women’s history, she met a professor who was separated from his wife; they had a daughter together but never married. When they broke up, six years later, Scaraffia became a single mother. She taught at Sapienza University of Rome and lived behind Rome’s Basilica of Santa Maria, in Trastevere. One day, in her late thirties, she saw worshippers carrying an icon of the Madonna into the church. She was struck, she said, by “a very powerful physical feeling of awe.” She went back to Mass.

She began contributing to L’Osservatore Romano in 2007, after Pope Benedict XVI asked its incoming editor, Giovanni Maria Vian, a philologist, to give women more space in the paper, which had no female reporters. “I wouldn’t dare call myself a feminist,” Vian told me, but, he said, in the church, “there has to be more space for women.” When Scaraffia asked Vian for a magazine of her own, for women, he relayed the request to Benedict, who gave his approval. (Scaraffia sees Benedict, who is now the first-ever Pope emeritus, rarely, but more often than she sees Francis, she told me. “As a woman, you really feel like he’s treating you just like a colleague,” she said, of the former pontiff.)

After meeting Scaraffia, I went to a gathering of Catholic women in Rome that was organized by Paola Lazzarini, a sociologist based in Sardinia, who described Scaraffia to me as “a point of reference for all of us.” Lazzarini, together with about thirty other women, co-authored a document called “Manifesto of Women for the Church.” (The authors originally connected on Facebook.) She e-mailed it to Scaraffia, who published it in the March issue of Women Church World, opposite the report on the servitude of nuns. Lazzarini has since begun setting up public forums across Italy, at which she hoped that women, especially in more socially conservative regions like Calabria, where she hosted the first meeting, would become “conscious of their condition in the Church.”

This particular gathering was held in a parochial room behind the Basilica of Santa Maria, the church where Scaraffia had returned to Catholicism three decades before. About a dozen women, and a few men, gathered in a semicircle. A woman in her fifties told the group that she had taught religion in a school until she got divorced, at which point the local bishop ordered her to be fired. A schoolteacher told the group how frustrating it was that Catholic parishes don’t seem to know what to do with women who aren’t sweet.

Lazzarini and I had coffee the next morning. A former nun, she is now married and has a young daughter. She wore pearls, and her hair was buoyantly arranged. She left her congregation after five years, she said, frustrated by how often women were underestimated by the Church’s male leaders. While patriarchal attitudes persist in the secular world, she said, in the Church, women’s obedience “is presented as if it was God’s will.” But what if women felt “strong enough to give the Church what they know?” she said. “What they can do? And not submit themselves in order to please men?” She finished her espresso, then added, “It’s our turn to speak not only for ourselves but to speak for the Church.”

Two years ago, Pope Francis convened a commission to study the possibility of female deacons. A deacon can perform many of a priest’s tasks, including baptisms, but can’t consecrate the host. In October, Women Church World published an op-ed, by the editor of the prominent Jesuit magazine America, reporting that a majority of Catholic women in the U.S. want the Church to ordain female deacons. But Scaraffia told me that she believes Francis will not accept female deacons—that he does not want women to be ordained as clerics of any rank. (This past summer, not for the first time, Francis explicitly ruled out the possibility of female priests: only men can be priests, according to the Holy See, because Jesus chose only men as his apostles.) Other Catholic activists are more optimistic. Kate McElwee, the executive director of the Women’s Ordination Conference, told me that she finds Pope Francis’s “openness to dialogue” encouraging. “We know there are women who are called by God,” she said.

Cardinals, in any case, need not be called by God—only man. “Cardinals are an invention of the Church, to govern itself,” Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology at Villanova, told me. In the first millennium, the title was an honorific for respected men, without specific duties or power. In 1059, the Church gave cardinals the exclusive right to elect the pontiff. Fourteen years later, Pope Gregory VII began to reduce the number of laymen in favor of clerics. (The idea was to excise corruption by replacing ethically suspicious laymen with good, and loyal, holy men.)

Still, there was no prohibition, earthly or empyrean, on laymen entering the ranks, and, here and there, they did. But, after the Italian kingdom fully conquered the Papal States, in the nineteenth century, the church became “more priestly,” as Faggioli put it. Cardinals had lost much of their temporal power, so they were increasingly seen less as secular diplomats and more as religious men. Pope Pius IX selected the last unordained cardinal, in 1858, an Italian lawyer named Teodolfo Mertel. In 1917, the Holy See changed canon law, restricting the cardinalate to the ordained. (In the nineteen-eighties, the law was updated to restrict candidacies to bishops alone.) Canon law, however, is not gospel. If the Pope wants to change it, Faggioli said, “he can do that with a stroke of the pen.”

Scaraffia says that the Catholic anthropologist Mary Douglas gave her the idea that women could be made cardinals. The Spanish newspaper El País revived the notion shortly after Francis was elected, speculating that the new pontiff might include a woman’s name in his first selections for the College of Cardinals. Francis’s spokesman at the time, Federico Lombardi, told that press that it was “not remotely realistic.” But, he conceded, “theologically and theoretically, it is possible.” Francis is the first Jesuit Pope and the first Latin American Pope; he has alarmed conservative clerics by suggesting that people who are divorced, and women who have had abortions, might be welcomed back to take communion.

Yet women still hold none of the highest or second-highest positions in the Vatican’s government, the Roman Curia. Pope Francis “is not a feminist,” Scaraffia told me, in June. But he is, she believes, a “good politician,” an adaptive realist who can see that the Church, in its present form, is disappointing and wounding many of its members. In September, Francis’s council of cardinal advisers issued a statement announcing that it would ask the Pope to evaluate “the work, structure and composition of the Council itself.” As Chantal Götz, the managing director of Voices of Faith, another group advocating for women’s rights in the Church, put it to me, when I asked her about Scaraffia’s suggestion, “What a symbolic gesture it would be if the Pope named women to the cardinal slots emptied by cardinals implicated in the coverup of sexual abuse.”

In August, I wrote to Pope Francis’s spokesman, Greg Burke, to ask him if his boss would name a woman to the rank of cardinal. “It is an interesting debate,” Burke replied. “But the Pope is not going to name women cardinals.” I e-mailed Scaraffia and reported his reply. Was Pope Francis’s answer definitive, in her eyes? And what did she make of the summer’s clerical meltdown? She did not regard Burke’s reply as final—and my two questions, she added, are related. “I think we are experiencing a serious and profound crisis of the Church,” she wrote, adding that it would result in real change. Perhaps, she continued, such change might include, “who knows, maybe even women Cardinals!”

On October 3rd, Pope Francis delivered a homily at the opening of the Synod of Bishops, a month-long conference on Church matters. (This one was focussed on the Church’s relationship with its younger members.) “A church that does not listen . . . cannot be credible,” he told the assembled clerics, which included fifty cardinals. At the synod, participants vote on proposals for Pope Francis; this time, the Vatican invited a few dozen women, but they did not have voting rights. Eleven advocacy groups, including Lazzarini’s organization, created a petition insisting that women vote at the synod, which was delivered to the synod’s office with more than nine thousand signatures. The rules were not amended. On Saturday, the synod adopted a sixty-page final document that highlighted “the absence of women’s voices and points of view” and recommended “making everyone more aware of the urgency of an inescapable change.”

Meanwhile, the latest issue of Women Church World includes an article under Scaraffia’s byline. There are those who think that a “ ‘good’ Pope” will eventually “open the doors to women,” appointing them to top positions in church government, she writes. But, she goes on, women can’t wait for that Pope. Women, too, were complicit in the church’s sexual-abuse crisis: made to play the role of “obedient daughters,” they served the clerics who protected one another. “The condition of women in the Church will only change if women have the courage to begin to change it from below,” she writes. Two days before the Synod of Bishops began, a symposium, put on by the group Catholic Women Speak, was held in Rome. There, Scaraffia was even more explicit. “Why don’t we become a nuisance in every place where women are not present?” she said. “I am leading a war against the patriarchy of the Church.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Vatican Faces Modern-Day Suffragists, Demanding Right to Vote

A protest by members of the Women’s Ordination Conference in Vatican City earlier this month coincided with the synod’s opening and drew the attention of the police.

By Elisabetta Povoledo

Two modern-day American suffragists had a plan.

During this month’s Synod of Bishops, an international gathering at the Vatican, Deborah Rose-Milavec and Kate McElwee, who lead groups dedicated to advancing women in leadership roles in the Roman Catholic Church, made sure that Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, the synod’s general secretary, was presented with a hefty pink folder.

Inside was a petition with more than 9,000 signatures and one specific request: Allow female religious superiors at the synod to “vote as equals alongside their Brothers in Christ.”

The petition’s request, said Ms. Rose-Milavec, the executive director of Future Church and Ms. McElwee, who holds the same post at the Women’s Ordination Conference, was a minor volley in what has seemed to be an insurmountable battle to get the male-centric Catholic Church to pay serious attention to women, who represent about half the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics but count for little where it matters.

Vatican synods are held every few years. Women have emerged as a major concern of this one, which opened earlier this month and focuses on how the church can better minister to today’s youth in an era of emptying pews.

“The presence of women in the church, the role of women in the church,” has been repeatedly raised, in the synod’s plenary meeting and within smaller working groups, said Sister Sally Marie Hodgdon, the superior general of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Chambery, and a synod participant. “The youth bring it up, as have some of the bishops and cardinals.”

“Clearly,” she added, the issue of women will be in the final document, which will be voted on Saturday.

But women, who make up about a tenth of the 340 or so synod participants, won’t be among the voters. Until this synod, only ordained men were allowed to vote on recommendations to the working document, whose final draft is given to the pope, who can include as much as he wants in his own post-synodal reflection.

This year, though, two men who are not ordained but are the superiors general of their respective religious orders have been granted the right to vote. Sister Hodgdon, too, is a superior general, but she has no voting rights.

Pope Francis with Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, left, general secretary of the Synod of Bishops, at the Vatican this month. Francis has spoken often of a more-incisive presence for women in the church, but critics say he needs to do more.

For some Catholics, the difference clearly smacks of the sexism that “underlines the grave marginalization of women in the church,” said Lucetta Scaraffia, the editor of a monthly insert on women in the Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano. “It’s a clamorous injustice. It demonstrates that the criteria they use is not between priest and lay people, but between women and men,” she said.

The cover of the October insert, “Women, Church, World,” depicted a woman shouting angrily. The intent of the issue, Ms. Scaraffia said, was to encourage debate and to get women “to protest every time there is a reason to protest.”

“What are they afraid of? One woman voting, honestly!” said Ms. McElwee, of the Women’s Ordination Conference, who helped to draft the petition and was an organizer of a protest that coincided with the synod’s opening, on Oct. 3.

Standing outside the gates that lead to the synod hall inside Vatican City that day, several dozen women and men chanted: “Knock, knock.” “Who’s there?” “More than half the church.” The protest was peaceful — “a prayer groups is more disruptive,” Ms. McElwee said — but still drew the attention of the police, who brought the protest to a halt, identified all the protesters and forced some to delete footage of the demonstration from their mobile phones

The petition to allow female superiors general a synod vote was a “strategic” move toward their more equal participation in church matters, Ms. McElwee said, adding that she realized it confirmed the “ultimate fear” of some clerics who see it as a step down a “slippery slope that could eventually lead to women’s ordination” as priests.

Such ordination, Ms. McElwee said, was “the last door that’s closed to women,” though there are many doors in between. Church teaching says that women can’t be priests because Jesus chose only men as his apostles.

Various studies of religious affiliation in the United States show that young people are leaving the Catholic Church in greater numbers than before for many reasons. Women have traditionally been the bedrock of the faithful, but a study last year by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) of Catholic women showed that they are less engaged than in the past.

Those numbers have not raised the loud warning bells in the Catholic Church that they should have, critics say.

“For the first time in history women are leaving at greater rates than men,” said Ms. Rose-Milavec. “That is a deep dive.”

Pope Francis has spoken often of a more-incisive presence for women in the church, and six women occupy senior roles in the five dozen departments that make up the Catholic Church’s governing body, the Holy See. Critics say he needs to do more.

Sister Sally Maries Hodgdon, center, the superior general of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Chambery, is a synod participant but has no voting rights on the final document, which will be voted on Saturday.

In 2016, Francis appointed a commission to review the place that female deacons had in the early church, a move seen by some as possibly opening the way to female deacons in the modern era. But the commission has not made its finding public, and the cardinal who heads it made clear last June that advising the pope on modern-day female deacons had never been on its agenda

“Through his positive statements, Pope Francis has really raised women’s expectations about the changes that he plans in order to bring more women into leadership roles,” Petra Dankova, the advocacy director of Voices of Faith, replied in a written response to questions. “But concrete actions have followed slowly and without an overarching plan.”

Voice of Faith, based in Liechtenstein, is pushing for women to gain full leadership roles in the Catholic Church. It has urged the close-knit group of cardinals who advise the pope on various issues that it should establish a special advisory board for women, Ms. Dankova said.

The question of their involvement in the church, she added, “is too complex and it cannot be expected to be somehow solved on the side without a concentrated attention and without the collaboration with women themselves.”

That suggestion has fallen on deaf ears, although some top prelates at the synod have been vocal in their support of women.

On Wednesday, speaking to reporters at a daily Vatican briefing, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, chairman of the German Bishop’s Conference, said that the issue of women’s roles in the church was “important for the entire church,” which must understand the evolution of women’s equality as a gift from God.

“We would be foolish not to make use of the potential of women,” Cardinal Marx said. “Thank God we are not that stupid.”

Male religious superiors at the synod have also been supportive, and the umbrella groups of both male and female superiors general have drafted a concrete proposal to allow women superiors to participate as voting members in future synods. If ratified by their respective boards, the proposal would be presented to the pope, Sister Hodgdon said.

After living in Rome for eight years, Sister Hodgdon, an American, said she has learned that the ways of the Church took time. Female superior generals were not likely to get the right to vote in this synod, she conceded. “But do I believe it will happen for the next one? Yes, I really do believe that.”

The next synod is scheduled for October 2019, and will focus on issues related to the Amazon region.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Posted on

Catholic Church must face reality

Scandal rocks the church, and wrongly it still opposes ordaining women as priests.

Pope Francis greets the crowds in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican in July.

By Roy Bourgeois

As a Catholic priest, I did the unspeakable. I called for the ordination of women. The Vatican’s response was swift. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith informed me that I was “causing grave scandal” in the church, and that I had 30 days to recant my support for the ordination of women or be expelled from the priesthood.

I told the Vatican that was not possible. Believing that women and men are created of equal worth and dignity, and that both are called by an all-loving God to serve as priests, my conscience would not allow me to recant. In my response, I also made clear that when Catholics hear the word “scandal,” many think about the thousands of children who have been raped and abused by Catholic priests — not about the ordination of women.

In 2010, the Vatican called women’s ordination a crime comparable to sexual abuse of children. Judging from its actions, however, it would appear that the Vatican views women’s ordination as a crime more serious than child abuse. Among the thousands of priests who raped and sexually abused children, the vast majority were not expelled from the priesthood or excommunicated. But the Vatican has excommunicated every woman ordained to the Catholic priesthood.

And in November 2012, after serving as a Catholic priest with the Maryknoll order for 40 years, I was expelled from the priesthood for refusing to recant my support for the ordination of women.

Today, scandal again rocks the Catholic Church. This time, it’s six Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania. According to a grand jury report, beginning in the 1950s, more than 300 “predator priests” sexually abused more than 1,000 children.

The 1,400-page report, written by 23 grand jurors over the course of two years, said, “Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all. For decades.” Among the horrific crimes that Catholic priests committed:

  • In the Pittsburgh diocese, “a ring of predatory priests shared information regarding victims, as well as exchanging the victims among themselves. The ring manufactured child pornography and used whips, violence and sadism in raping the victims.”
  • One priest abused five sisters in the same family, including one girl beginning when she was 18 months old.
  • Another priest was allowed to stay in ministry after impregnating a young girl and arranging for her to have an abortion.
  • A priest raped a 7-year-old girl in her hospital room after a tonsillectomy. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith reviewed his crime and decided that he should remain a priest and “live a life of prayer and penance.”

The Pennsylvania grand jury report concluded that the Catholic hierarchy “protected the institution at all cost and maintained strategies to avoid scandal.” Priests who got into trouble were shuffled to another diocese where more children were abused. The FBI determined that church officials followed a “playbook for concealing the truth,” minimizing the abuse by using words like “inappropriate contact” or “boundary issues” instead of “rape.”

If the Catholic Church had women priests, the church would not be in the crisis it is in today. I am equally confident that if the Catholic Church does not dismantle its all-male priesthood and welcome women as equals, it will drift into irrelevance.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!